Photographer Has Faith in Churches : Mary McAleer of Newport describes herself as a pagan but is drawn to places of worship, which she captures on film.

Mary McAleer earns her keep with a camera, generally pointing it at posh hotels. The results can be found in glossy magazines and pamphlets, in ads for the Hyatt hotel chain, the Ritz-Carlton and others: photos of beckoning opulence, golden sunsets and carefree people on the greenest of golf courses.

Then, in her version of a busman’s holiday, she takes her cameras to church.

Her commercial photography “is what pays for the cat food and the rent,” and she says she approaches it with as much skill and soul as she can. “I’m always photographing for other people, doing pictures for others, thousands of sheets of film,” she said. “But when I take pictures for myself, it feels different.

“We all have our own little crazies. Mine is photographing churches everywhere. I travel a lot in my work, and when I’m on my own time I roam around and somehow always end up shooting churches.”

She has some arresting shots, particularly of the early 1800s stone churches of her Lowell, Mass., hometown. In some, the arches, vaulted ceilings and ornate columns seem only to be the shell to a deeper presence of light and volume contained within. From another clime, a shot of a concrete-looking church in Maui presents a disquieting juxtaposition of austere straight lines to the nature surrounding it. “It looked so sterile; I really liked it,” she said.

There is a curious intimacy to another photograph, which isn’t quite of a church, but rather of a fanciful, candle-lit shrine to Bacchus she found in the caves of a Napa Valley, in an alcove flanked by casks and shadows.

McAleer, who lives in Newport Beach, doesn’t photograph every church she sees by a long shot and has particularly little use for the ones she finds locally, she says. With a background in architectural photography, she says it is the structure of the place that usually must intrigue her. Or sometimes it is the quality of the light in a building that draws her, be it a church or a biker bar.

She helms half of the Costa Mesa-based photography firm Milroy & McAleer, with partner Mark Milroy, and their work has taken her to some far-flung locations. Hence she has shots of churches in Puerto Rico, Ireland, various Pacific islands, Mexico, the Caribbean, Canada, islands off Georgia and other spots.

She hasn’t kept track of how many church photos she’s amassed, but it’s probably in the thousands. “When I have a motor drive on the camera, it can get pretty scary,” she says. She rarely goes out with the aim of photographing a particular church, preferring instead to see what catches her eye in her travels. She is similarly aimless regarding the finished product, making no attempt to exhibit, market or even particularly organize her shots.

The one exception is a hand-bound book, “A Fading Legacy; The Stone Churches of New England.” It is a small but deluxe volume, with quality prints mounted on handmade paper, then hand-bound in an accordion-folded antique Japanese manner. With the help of an artist friend, she’s only making 10 of the books and doesn’t plan on selling them. Rather, she intends to use them as calling cards to gain access to other churches.

“I got serious about these photographs because the churches are in my hometown where I grew up in New England. They’re really pretty, sort of in the style of (17th-Century British architect) Christopher Wren. But these particular churches are starting to fall away to nothing, and they’re not being restored, because it takes so much to restore them. They’re really beautiful and they’re going away. One I heard has already been destroyed, and I’d only been able to get the exterior.

“The reason I made the book is I really wanted to shoot more of these churches, and I couldn’t get the archdiocese to let me in. Maybe they’re embarrassed to let them be photographed the way they are. They may also have safety concerns. But I thought maybe if they saw with the book that I wasn’t trying to do anything bad they might be willing to let me go in. It would be a shame to lose them without some record of them,” she said.

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McAleer, 48, has been photographing churches for nearly 20 years. It was about that long ago she started on the course that led to her photography career.

“Around 1975 I was in a situation where I felt I needed to go back to school. I was married, two kids, and my relationship was not great. I realized I needed to re-educate myself so I could support my kids.

“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, whether I was going to be a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief. I’d always taken pictures, so I started studying photography, at Saddleback and OCC, while I was figuring out what I wanted to do. I really got into it, realized I could make my living as a photographer, and, as things were going really bad in the marriage, I had to realize that the only thing I really knew how to do then was take pictures, so I started.”

She met Milroy in school and they became business partners in 1979. Initially she specialized in architectural photography--and returned to OCC to teach it for a time--before branching into the fleshier “lifestyle” work of their resort accounts. Her children are raised, and the business is sailing along.

Aside from the California missions--where she finds a “flamboyance and kind of macabre association with death”--McAleer hasn’t been moved my many Southland churches, where, she quotes a friend of hers, the only renovating is done with a wrecking ball. She says she especially shuns “these incredible edifices that only make you think, ‘Boy, they must have a lot of money!’ ”

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She gets a deeper feeling out of the churches she photographs.

“These stone churches around Lowell were built from 1830 and 1850. These were Irish Catholic churches, and they looked at them as the communal wealth. These people were terribly poor, but they pooled all their resources and capabilities, put their labor in and worked the stone, to build these. They may have lived in shanties, but they had this house of worship that was very special. I think of it as the legacy of all they had.

“There’s something to me about where people gather, the energy of a special place where they feel they can communicate with their god. They’re designed as if they picture their god in a castle, so they have a feudal, castle-like place to visit him. I guess because I grew up in a particularly religious family, those were special places when I was a kid.”

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Those memories give her mixed feelings about the churches today.

“I think when the churches are empty I get more of a feeling spirituality from them than when they’re full. I get nervous about the whole service aspect of them. I’d probably get more (feeling of transcendence) out of a Van Morrison concert, or walking under the trees.

“I was a Catholic. I wasn’t a very good Catholic, nor do I care to be anymore. Having survived several years of parochial school education, I’ve always thought of all that ‘go to purgatory until all the sins are burnt off’ or whatever the deal is to be terrorist tactics. I consider myself to be more of a pagan than anything else.

“But church is something I did because my family did when I was a kid. And the churches are still some part of a special meaning to me, because my family was so into it. My family used it as a gathering place and for special times: marriages, births, christenings, first Communions, funerals. And just from the structure of the places, I still get caught up in that. I’m always amazed by them, amazed by how much care goes into them,” she said.